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We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

A: Have realized that when compatibility with the outside world counts, especially with VBA, Microsoft Office Wins.

I would hardly consider VBA support in Microsoft Office to be 'compatibility with the outside world'. Visual Basic for Applications is a proprietary Microsoft technology and arguably contributes to Office lock-in due to the lack of complete implementations outside of Office.

Science News has a fascinating look at an under-appreciated corner of the career of Florence Nightingale — as an innovator in the use of statistical graphics to argue for social change. Nightingale returned from the Crimean War a heroine in the eyes of the British citizenry, for the soldiers' lives she had saved. But she came to appreciate that the way to save far more lives was to reform attitudes in the military about sanitation. Under the tutelage of William Farr, who had just invented the field of medical statistics, she compiled overwhelming evidence (in the form of an 830-page report) of the need for change. "As impressive as her statistics were, Nightingale worried that Queen Victoria's eyes would glaze over as she scanned the tables. So Nightingale devised clever ways of presenting the information in charts. Statistics had been presented using graphics only a few times previously, and perhaps never to persuade people of the need for social change."

In just a few days, some of us will be making the trek to this year's Blizzcon event in Anaheim, CA. In addition to the interesting announcements, sneak peeks, and other distractions, we will be sitting down with several Blizzard employees to answer any questions you might have. So far we have scheduled some time with Chris Sigaty, lead producer on StarCraft II; Jeffrey Kaplan (aka Tigole), game director for World of Warcraft; Leonard Boyarsky, lead world designer on Diablo III; and Paul Sams, Blizzard COO. Please address your questions to one (or several) of these candidates and try to keep them civil and on topic. Questions about Diablo III's art style will most likely be omitted since we have limited time and that dead horse has already been beaten into submission. The usual Slashdot interview rules apply, but beyond that, the sky is the limit.

An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post's Security Fix blog today features a funny but scary interview with a guy in Seattle who owns the domain name donotreply.com. Apparently, everyone from major US banks to the Transportation Security Administration to contractors in Iraq use some variation on the address in the "From:" field of all e-mails sent out, with the result that bounced e-mails go to the owner of donotreply.com.'With the exception of extreme cases like those mentioned above, Faliszek says he long ago stopped trying to alert companies about the e-mails he was receiving. It's just not worth it: Faliszek said he is constantly threatened with lawsuits from companies who for one reason or another have a difficult time grasping why he is in possession of their internal documents and e-mails.'"

theodp writes "For 200 members of the Immanuel Bible Church and their friends, the annual Super Bowl party is over thanks to the NFL, which explained that airing NFL games at churches on large-screen TV sets violates the NFL copyright. Federal copyright law includes an exemption for sports bars, according to NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy, but churches are out of luck. Churchgoers who aren't averse to a little drinking-and-driving still have the opportunity to see the game together in public on a screen bigger than 55 inches."

taoman1 writes "Today Google showed off a ad-supported cellphone that the company plans to offer for free to interested parties. The product could reach the marketplace within a year, and will offer Google search, email, and a web browser. 'The move would echo another recent product launched by a phone industry outsider, Apple Inc.'s iPhone. But Google's product would draw its revenue from a sharply different source, relying on commercial advertising dollars instead of the sticker price of at least US$499 for an iPhone and $60 per month for the AT&T Inc. service plan. Negotiating the fairest way to split those advertising revenues with service providers could be a big hurdle for Google, one analyst said. Another problem is the potential that consumers could be scared off by the prospect of listening to advertisements before being able to make phone calls, said Jeff Kagan, a wireless and telecommunications industry analyst in Atlanta.'"

thefickler writes "Microsoft has announced that Office 2008 for Mac, originally slated for a 2007 release, will now be released in January 2008. No specific reasons were pinpointed in the announcement other than the software was not meeting its quality checkpoints in June and July of this year. Surprise, surprise."

Rolgar writes "PBS' Bob Cringely theorizes that since the Apple TV will be an always-on device with a 40GB hard drive, Apple may move to content distribution via a P2P network. The ISPs will incur higher bandwidth locally, possibly lose some subscribers to cable TV, but have fewer costs through the Tier II Internet backbone providers. Bob also expects that Google will be involved with their fiber network and advertising expertise, and my hope is that they'll bundle in YouTube content as well. The article suspects that they won't get around to announcing the full details of this plan until they hit a half million units or more, and that this Apple and Google pairing will become the equivalent of a cable TV provider with almost none of the infrastructure costs. Eventually, he hopes, we'll see a real HD revolution from Apple and Google for this service." If Apple rolled something like this out to the service, would you bite on it? What would it take you to move to this over Tivo or MythTV?

One thing we just can't wrap our mind about is the terrible, broken, and completely pitiful support for waking Vista up from a Deep Sleep or hibernation.

Anytime you attempt to wake Vista up from Hibernation or "Deep Sleep" (S3-induced sleep mode), it dies. It's either a BSOD, or a driver error, or a broken network, no DWM, lack of sound... the list goes on, and on. So much for an operating system to "power" the future! (No pun intended!) That's with properly-signed drivers and no buggy software on multiple PCs..."

l2718 writes to mention that In the wake of their recent deal with Microsoft, Novell has announced a new version of OpenOffice.org which will support Microsoft's planned Office formal, Open XML. From the article: "The translators will be made available as plug-ins to Novell's OpenOffice.org product. Novell will release the code to integrate the Open XML format into its product as open source and submit it for inclusion in the OpenOffice.org project. As a result, end users will be able to more easily share files between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org, as documents will better maintain consistent formats, formulas and style templates across the two office productivity suites."

simoniker writes "As part of a larger in-depth interview over at Gamasutra, 3D Realms' Scott Miller has called for Valve's Steam digital distribution service to spin off as a separate company, suggesting: 'I would rather there emerge a leader in the market that isn't associated with a game company.' He further adds: 'I'm not a big fan of using Steam, because I'm not a fan of a strong competitor of ours having access to our download stats and revenue totals. I'd rather keep that private. Not only that, but we're lining their pockets as well.'"

snib writes "Microsoft has launched Aggreg8, a 'social networking and collaboration space for the IT community.' Apparently, the owner of the popular open-source RSS reader of the same name sold the domains to Microsoft for $5000 in August in order to host what was then called 'Microcosm.' Microsoft hopes their new service, which utilizes Windows Live ID (formerly .NET Passport) authentication, will become a 'MySpace-like forum for developers to share scripts, tools, or best practices, or even to just connect with others within the profession.'"

elcid73 (599126) writes "I listen to a large variety of podcasts with different publishing schedules and levels of interest that has led me to believe that the simple podcast managment of iTunes has failed to meet my needs.

iTunes applies a blanket approach to podcast subscriptions that assumes they are all consumed in the same manner; its a music manager first that has been adopted for podcasts. It should instead embrace the many ways that audio is being published and subscribed to. One suggestion would be to move the concept of playlists over to podcasts and allow us to set download/sync options on playlists instead of each individual podcast.

I plan to evaluate ODEO, Juice, Songbird shortly, but what other software/projects are out there for someone who loves the "whole iPod experience" but feels left out here? Is anyone else despondent with iTunes for podcasts?"